Accelerating Future

Here is a roundup of recent interesting items.

Stratfor: The Caucasus Cauldron

“Of all the regions of the world, this one is among the most potentially explosive. It is the most likely to draw in major powers and the most likely to involve the United States. It is quiet now — but like the Balkans in 1990, quiet does not necessarily reassure any of the players.”

Bina48 was in the New York Times, as you may have heard. I previously attended a mock trial where the fictional AI Bina48 was seeking asylum as a sovereign individual from the company that created her, Exabit. This new robotic Bina48 was created by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics. Hanson will be speaking at the upcoming Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco. Politics Daily also has a post reacting to Bina48. A local Vermont news station has more quotes.

Discover has coverage of a recent breakthrough in tooth regeneration gel.

Beverly Nuckols at the Texas GOP blog has somewhat of an odd response to Ron Bailey. She is responding to Bailey’s quote where he said:

I ended by explaining that as a minority preference (at least for now) transhumanists must argue for liberty and not be seduced by democratic happy-talk. When people of good will deeply disagree on moral issues that don’t involve the prevention of force or fraud, it is a fraught exercise to submit their disagreement to a panel of political appointees or a democratic vote. That way leads to intolerance, repression, and social conflict.

I definitely agree with this on a certain level. I feel we are living in a nanny state that facilitates increasing self-domestication of the human species. The book The Ten Thousand Year Explosion also has more great material on this hypothesis. When social conformism becomes such a powerful selection pressure in the cultural development of the species, we have to step back and reevaluate what we are becoming. My experience in school in a suburb of San Francisco (Burlingame) led me to believe that I was being conditioned to be an mindlessly obedient white-collar wage slave. I’m sure it is worse in many places in the US and around the world.

The Guardian has a new article out on Edward Cope, the UC Santa Cruz professor who is creating an Artificial Intelligence that writes moving pieces of classic music. A student at UC Santa Cruz told me that he is the only professor he knows of who can elicit a standing ovation from his students after a lecture.

ZDNet has coverage of Wendell Wallach’s recent keynote at the World Futurist Society conference, “Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Techno Sapiens, and the Singularity”. You may recognize the image from his title slide as from a blog post of mine on cybernetic upgrades. I found that image unattributed on an image board.

Here’s an article on using narrow AI in improving team sports.

Vote on these proposals to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, please. I will provide more info in my next post.

There’s been a variety of exciting materials science and nanotechnology-related news from Nanowerk in the last week or two. There’s been a breakthrough in printable conductive ink that requires no secondary curing (good news for personal fabrication), asymmetric nanostructures to diagnose the early signs of cancer (the key to curing cancer will be detecting it early), self-assembling nanodevices that move and change shape on demand, and coverage of a recent nanoscale photography competition. The most exciting piece of news from there recently, however, have to do with the development of a new superhard, superconducting material, BC5, a type of boron-doped diamond. Here’s the first paragraph of the press release:

What could be better than diamond when it comes to a superhard material for electronics under extreme thermal and pressure conditions? Quite possibly BC5, a diamond-like material with an extremely high boron content that offers exceptional hardness and resistance to fracture, but unlike diamond, it is a superconductor rather than an insulator. A research team in China studying BC5 describes its potential in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).

An intertwined matrix of diamond and BC5 could provide the ultimate raw materials for rugged, miniaturized electronics. All of our electronic devices today are extremely fragile relative to what they could be. In the not-too-distant future, it may be possible to gently dunk our smartphones and laptops into salt water, lemon juice, whatever, and pull them right out and keep using them as if nothing happened. I want a laptop I can throw across the room without breaking it.

There was also recent news on using boron nanowire in body armor, including armor as thin as a T-shirt. Does anyone know if a boron carbide-reinforced T-shirt would stop, say, pistol bullets? I’m sure all the relevant numbers to make that calculation are out there. Carbon and boron — a match made in material science Heaven?

In a recent post responding to the NYT article about him and his wife, Robin Hanson said, in referring to the opposition to cryonics in the comments of that article:

It seems clear to me that opposition is driven by the possibility that it might actually work. If people were sure it wouldn’t work there’d be no point in talking about selfishness, immortality, etc. If the main issue were a waste of money we’d see an entirely different reaction.

Most of the public appears to see radical life extension and cryonics as potentially workable, just morally troubling. It seems to me that fear over life extension tends to diminish when one’s own life and health are put at risk, for all but the most dedicated paleo-conservatives.

Singularity Hub has good coverage of the recent lung-on-a-chip news.

Also: recently I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing a shared transhumanist/futurist blog, let me know if you’d be interested in contributing or could help with the IT side of things. Something that focuses on the same wide range of issues as Accelerating Future, and includes a mix of news and opinion, but has more people than just me. Especially get in touch with me if you are in the San Francisco area and want to help. My email can be found by clicking on my portrait in the lower left section of this site’s sidebar. If you’re interested, respond with an email, not in the comments. Thanks.

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From RepRap blog:

The Foresight Institute has announced its Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize to design and build a better RepRap. There is an interim prize of $20,000, and a grand prize of $80,000. They consulted with the core RepRap team before the announcement and we were initially concerned that the prizes might drive developers to secrecy in order to give themselves a competitive edge. As you will see they have addressed those concerns by making it a condition of winning the prize that solutions should be pre-published and made available under a free licence. For ourselves and on your behalf, we would like to thank the Institute for the enthusiasm that these prizes demonstrate for the RepRap project and for their magnificent generosity.

Congrats to Foresight Institute and Kartik Gada for establishing this interesting and substantial prize. There is another prize, too. Besides the Personal Manufacturing Prize, there is a Water Liberation Prize, described here:

The winner of the Water Liberation Prize of up to $50,000 will be the first person to invent a device that is either solar powered, manually cranked, or otherwise not dependent on the existence of an electrical grid, can produce at least 4 liters of potable (drinkable) water per day, either condensed from the air (as measured in approximate 50% ambient humidity) or filtered through a nanomembrane, and can be mass-produced (as demonstrated by a pilot run of no less than 100 units) for a cost of less than $5 per unit. The filter should be washable and re-usable, without requiring a periodic supply of new filters, as the device may be used in areas without access to a suitable distribution channel.

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Vik Olliver, a RepRap hobbyist, created a PLA mold (of a Mighty RepRap Power Ring), filled it with melted pewter, let it cool, then used a hammer to chip off the PLA material. This is the first use of RepRap with metal casting that I’m aware of. In his blog post on the topic, Olliver implies that it might be possible to try it with metals with higher melting points like aluminum or bronze, with proper research. Here is a photograph of the completed ring:

Also check out Thingiverse, which has plans for various designs for RepRap to fabricate. I really like the planetary gear calling card and Turner’s cube.

Plaster of Paris (which was used to shield the PLA from the heat of the melted pewter) has a melting point of 2660 °F (1460 °C), but according to Olliver, using metals like molten aluminum, with a temperature of 1220 °F (660 °C) or greater can “cause plaster of Paris to decompose in undesirable ways and you need to research it properly.”

For aluminum and bronze, you’d need investment, a type of plaster used by jewelers. According to the Plaster FAQ, it “will hang together just enough, after being brought to more than 1000 degrees F, to hold molten bronze and impart shape and fine detail, while still being friable enough to remove easily from the casting.” For even higher temperatures, ceramic shells must be used.

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There is lots of great activity happening at RepRap, with its superlative slogan, “wealth without money”. The big news lately is the upcoming release of “RepRap II”, also called Mendel. The first was Darwin. Here is a video of Mendel’s first print:

Mendel’s first print from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

The cost for the parts to build Mendel is approximately £395. However, it can self-replicate. Here’s a description of the improvements of Mendel over Darwin:

Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

And finally, here is a video of the 4-machine “RepRap Factory”, which consists solely of machines dedicated to building parts for other machines:

Multiple RepRaps from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

Congratulations to everyone at RepRap on their work.

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Check it out.

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